Manatee River, Tera Ceia Bay, Tampa Bay

May 30 th, 2008 

Big fish on in Tampa bay!

Plenty of fish are around, and if the time is right, they will almost jump in the boat! Fishing has been great over the past week, whether it’s been for tarpon, snook, redfish, trout, grouper, sharks, or others. However, the weather hasn’t been as good. The wind has been blowing on average 15 mph to 20mph daily, but regardless of what Mother Nature throws our way, we’ve been able to get on a great bite and catch some great fish.

Tarpon fishing Boca Grand! The fish are beginning to get back to normal now that the full moon is over. At times, fishing around a full moon is tough because the fish do a lot of feeding at night instead of the day. Mostly, we only had trouble with a few of the fish due to the full moon. We were still able to catch a great number of great fish.

The tarpon bite has been good. We hooked a few fish in the bay on some rock piles early in the morning each trip. Many fish have showed up off the beaches, but with the wind whipping, it has been too rough to get out there to catch them. We fished the second week of the Professional Tarpon Tournament Series last weekend in Boca Grande, Fl and managed to hook over six tarpon. We leader released the first fish of the day and took the second fish of the day to the scale to be weighed in. The fish weighed 144 lbs and held third place for most of the tournament. Toward the end of the tournament, someone caught and weighed a fish pushing our 144 pounder down to sixth place.

The redfish have been the toughest out of all of the fish to catch lately. However, we did catch a few that were over 27 inches, which are to big to keep.

Trout fishing has been great! Especially if you want some fish to take home and eat. We had to work a bit harder for the fish some days than others, but for the most part, we didn’t have any trouble catching a very nice mess of fish to take home each trip.

The great snook have still been going crazy. If the bite was slow with other fish, we switched to snook fishing and got on a great bite. There has been a large number of snook around. It seems like they come out when the season closes. I think the water temperature finally got up to where it needs to be for these fish. Snook fishing should just keep getting better as summer gets closer. Most of the snook we will start catching in the next couple of months will be a little on the smaller side, but are a lot of fun to catch on light tackle.

Please visit http://castawaychartersinc.com/  and book your trip today!

Capt. TJ Stewart
Castaway Charters, Inc.
5616 41 Ave. East
Bradenton, FL 34208
Phone: 941-737-5985
Email: CaptainTJStewart@yahoo.com
Website: http://castawaychartersinc.com/